


take me home and show me the sun

by liesmyth



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Canon Gay Character, Crying, First Time, Fix-It, Ghosts, Graveyard Sex, Hand Jobs, M/M, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), Power of Love, Resurrection, Spontaneous Manifestations of Derry Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-15 01:27:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21245258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liesmyth/pseuds/liesmyth
Summary: “I can see the headlines already —  'Comedian Richie Tozier caught masturbating in graveyard, arrested for indecent exposure in Maine'.”





	take me home and show me the sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scorpiod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiod/gifts).

It was damp in Maine this time of the year, and the wind was making it worse. Richie glared weakly at a skeletal-looking tree and huddled into his borrowed coat, idly wishing he’d brought a flask of something to warm himself up. He’d had a few drinks earlier, for courage, but as soon as he’d set foot at the end of Neibolt Street he knew he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Instead, he’d turned around and walked all the way to the outskirts of town. Derry was a lot bigger now than it had been two decades ago, but old memories still clung to familiar street corners, uneasiness cloying Richie’s throat until he felt like he couldn’t breathe. He’d started running then, chasing ghosts, and before he knew it his feet had brought him to Derry’s bare graveyard, with its rusty gates and brown grass. Like everything else in this town, it looked about as miserable as Richie felt.

There had been no body to bury when Eddie had died. He’d been reported missing, a perfunctory investigation still slumping along, and no one would ever know the truth. There had been no service, no way to say goodbye. Not that Richie could picture himself going, decked in a suit and standing way in the back behind Eddie’s sobbing wife and stern-faced colleagues, but maybe he’d have let Ben talk him into it. Maybe he would have brought a tasteful flower arrangement to a grave in Long Island, felt the coolness of marble as he traced Eddie’s name with his fingers.

Instead, he was standing in front of Frank and Sonia Kaspbrak’s unkempt plot, which was kind of ridiculous, frankly, but it was the closest thing he had to a memorial for Eddie. He’d been there for an hour or so, alternating between pacing restlessly and bawling his eyes out until the sun had begun to set.

It was cold. He breathed in the evening air, kicking idly a derelict-looking tussock and trying to decide if he was sober enough to drive back to his cousin’s place in Augusta before dinner.

“You’re kind of pathetic, dude,” Eddie’s voice said.

Richie jumped. He looked up, very slowly, from the grime and sewage coating Eddie’s shoes to his bloodied shirt to Eddie’s face, scarred and sombre and beautiful.

“_Holy shit_,” Richie said. “I didn’t think I was drunk enough for this.” A definite no to the driving then— did Derry have a cab service? Were Uber drivers a thing in the sticks of Maine?

Eddie was staring at him, stern-mouthed and unimpressed, like he was judging every single one of Richie’s life choices.

“I miss you,” he heard himself say, brokenly.

“I know.”

“Oh, fuck you, Han Solo.” He swung his leg around, staring to pace erratically. “You know, sometimes I wish I could forget you. Not really, but— I was a sad sack of shit before, but now I’m just…”

“I’m sorry.”

“I wake up in the middle of the night…” Heart bursting, chest tight, gasping like he couldn’t breathe, wondering if that was how a heart attack felt like. Blinking back tears and swallowing bile. “I wake up and I dream you’re there.”

Eddie’s smile strained the wound on his cheek. “Rich, that’s gay.”

“No shit, ghost Eddie. I thought I’d made peace with that.”

Eddie _mmphed_, considering. “You should’ve kissed me when you had the chance.”

“Yeah, I’m chickenshit, so what? It’s not like you were any better.”

Of course, even the ghost evoked by his alcohol-addled mind ended up roasting him. Maybe it was self-loathing, or his own damn fault for falling in love with an asshole in the first place, or maybe the two were one and the same.

“I miss you,” Eddie said, in a voice like the rustling of wind through autumn leaves. “I miss you all the time. I’m lonely and I can’t... I told myself that at least you were away from here, out in the world. That you were going to be happy.”

Richie shivered into his jacket. He swallowed, tears pricking in his nose— this was going to be so undignified. Voice croaking, he whispered. “I’m really not.”

They stood there in the damp twilight, making eyes across a gravestone.

And then Richie’s own grief-induced vision looked up at him with Eddie’s soulful gaze and said, “Kiss me.”

“What the _fuck_,” Richie said, emphatically, but those were Eddie’s eyes staring wistfully so close to his face, and it suddenly didn’t seem to matter as much that Eddie wasn’t actually here.

“Kiss me, Richie. I want— I want to feel.”

And then he was touching Richie’s cheek, cold fingers tracing the side of his face. He was solid in the way glass was solid, brittle and faintly transparent, and maybe it wasn’t a very flattering comparison but Richie dealt in dirty jokes, not poetry.

“You’re—” Richie said, but then he didn’t know how else to go on and Eddie’s mouth was on his own, unexpectedly tender, gently pressing against his chapped lips. The real Eddie would’ve said something cutting about chapstick or organic beeswax, and then probably bit down on his lip for good measure. This Eddie stroked his face reverently with the back of his fingers and pulled back slowly.

“Rich?”

He blinked. “I’m— yeah. Gotta say, I thought for a moment you were a spooky Derry creature about to suck my soul out of my body with a kiss, but I guess I’m just really going insane.” He reached out for Eddie again, feeling the shape of his shoulder under his torn shirt. “It’s not that bad.”

“I’m not going to suck your soul.”

“That’s good to know. I mean, not great news for my mental health but, hey.” He shrugged. “I thought you were going to bite me.”

“What, like a vampire?” Eddie said dryly.

“No, I just thought— I always thought about kissing you, all the time, and I figured that if I ever laid one on you just like that, you’d bite me.”

“You sound wistful.” This close, Eddie’s words were like bursts of cold winds on his neck. “Was this a fantasy of yours?”

“Shouldn’t you know that?” Richie retorted. “Yeah, of course it was. I had so many stupid fantasies about you being a little shit.” He sobbed. “Eds, I’m—”

“Shh,” Eddie said, and then he put his cold hand to the back of Richie’s neck and kissed him again, his mouth open and hungry. It made him shiver, shaking in Eddie’s embrace as he sobbed into what was undoubtedly a very unsexy kiss. But it felt good — the comfort and the closeness and the little sounds Eddie was making, so he let himself be kissed and didn’t dare open his eyes in fear that it would all disappear. There was a faint scent enveloping him, like petrichor and chrysanths and something of how the real Eddie had smelled, an expensive cologne that Richie wouldn’t have thought anyone actually used.

Thirteen-year-old Richie would have been so horny if he’d known how Eddie was going to grow up, with his cologne and leather shoes. Like the hazy fantasy of a sophisticated lover out of his mother’s cheap romance novels, and still so much of a dorky dickhead that Richie’s throat felt tight if he stared at him too much. Forty-year-old Richie was horny right now, actually, which was all kinds of troubling and probably fucked up, but then Eddie licked into his mouth encouragingly and slid his thigh between Richie’s legs, so. Clearly, his teenage fantasy of dry-humping in the clubhouse hammock was still rattling around his mind somewhere.

He laughed at the unbelievability of it all, and Eddie pulled back and said, “At least you stopped crying. You know, I could _taste_ your tears, that’s so not how I’d have wanted our first kiss to go.”

“Sorry. ‘Least it’s not snot,” Richie pointed out. He sniffled. “Could’ve been worse.”

“You’re so disgusting.”

“I really am,” he said, and Eddie glared up at him looking stupidly fond and then he was kissing again, his (cold, dead) manicured hands going directly for Richie’s belt.

“Uh—” he tried to say, but Eddie took the chance to slide his tongue into Richie’s mouth and that was almost as distracting as the thing his hands were doing around Richie’s boxers. He wondered how the hell he must look right now if there’d been anyone watching, and the thought actually gave him pause.

“Eddie,” he began to say, but Eddie just hummed softly as he kissed Richie’s neck. “Eddie. Eds. Look.” He tried to pull away, except he didn’t actually want to, so his efforts were half-hearted at best. “This is the greatest hallucination I ever had, and I did so much LSD in my twenties…” Eddie frowned at that, so Richie kissed him again. “You’re dead, don’t give me the health stats right now. I miss you so much, fuck my healthy grieving process, I just want—”

“I want _you_,” Eddie said, quietly, and something heavy and jagged caught in Richie’s throat.

“I want you too,” he whispered “So bad. Sometimes I think I'll never… I wake up and I think I'm never going to want anyone else.”

Eddie’s mouth fell open at that, jaw going slack in surprise; he looked adorably embarrassed for a brief moment and then suddenly very sad. His lips moved like he wanted to say something, but then he kissed him again instead, and Richie thought he got the message. More touching, less emotionally stunted conversation.

“Why are you so frisky, anyway?” Richie asked, half-hoping that the answer would be something nonsensical pulled out of his high school wet dreams like, _I've been dreaming of your dick all my life_ or, _I want you big stud_, but Eddie just shook his head and looked away.

“I miss touch,” he said. “It’s stupid, I don’t— I didn’t even like touching people that much, but I miss being touched. And I want you to... we had good times together, but we never had this.”

Richie’s heart crumpled in his chest. “Oh.”

“I meant it when I said you should’ve kissed me when I was alive,” Eddie said. “I don’t know if— I probably might have bitten you. Or pushed you away, or said something stupid. But you should have tried.”

“_Eddie_,” he said, feeling choked up, and he thought he might start crying again. Instead, he cleared his throat and said, “Alright, I’m down for it, but I don’t think it’s going to work. I probably have whiskey dick.”

“You’re not _that_ drunk,” Eddie said, a reassurance that really didn’t mean coming from the ghost of his dead friend. Then his hands slid up Richie’s hips and back into his boxers and Richie inhaled sharply because, cold ghost hands or not, Eddie's touch felt nice.

“I really hope no one's around,” he said. “I can see the headlines already— comedian Richie Tozier caught masturbating in graveyard, arrested for indecent exposure in Maine.”

“With your fanbase that'd only get you more Twitter followers,” Eddie said acidly, and when Richie laughed he kissed him in a bump of teeth that made him hiss.

His hand was kind of vicious wrapped around Richie’s dick, which was actually surprisingly good; there was something very Eddie about it. Richie’s own hands were flailing uselessly, but clearly _something_ was touching him, and he wondered again what exactly was happening and what kind of hallucination he was trapped in.

“You’re overthinking this,” Eddie said. “It’s just… you’re here, and I’m here, and I want to make you feel good. I want…” he trailed off, pressing his lips to Richie’s neck.

“Yeah?” Richie urged. He closed his eyes, so all he could feel was Eddie’s voice and Eddie’s scent and Eddie’s hand on him that didn’t feel as cold now as it had a minute earlier.

“I don’t know. I never thought about it. Before.” He heard him swallow. “What would you have done?”

Oh, god. He felt dizzy when he thought about all the things he’d wanted; it was overwhelming to consider. He pushed up erratically into Eddie’s hand and swallowed. “Everything. I would have done everything with you. I would've — taken you out to dinner and bought you ice cream and won you stupid stuffed animals at the fair.”

“I always bought you ice cream,” Eddie said, and Richie’s heart gave a squeeze.

“I would've taken you home.” It was all blending together; Richie didn’t know if he was talking about his adolescent daydreams or his adult fantasies, if he was picturing Eddie in his childhood bed or in his empty house in Los Angeles. Anything. Everything. “I would have… we would've fallen asleep watching movies,” he said. “And then I was going to suck your dick.”

“_Shit_.” Eddie’s breath on his neck was cold, like the rest of him. Richie shivered.

“I used to think about it all the time. I was sitting in class and I'd look at you and— when we went to the movies and you sat next to me, it was torture.” It had been the torment and delight of his adolescence; the smell of warm butter and popcorn, Eddie’s tucked in warmly against his side, his voice in Richie’s ear and Eddie’s fingers digging in his arm. “I wanted to kiss up your thigh, and then I was going to…”

“You should have.”

“You would've run screaming for the hills, Eds.”

Eddie’s body stiffened. “Don’t say that,” he said, tightening the grip of his fingers around Richie’s cock in warning. Joke was on him; it was Eddie, so of course Richie liked it. His legs shook, and he thought— there was nothing about Eddie he didn’t like.

He shrugged. “Maybe I should have.”

Eddie’s mouth found his again. “What else did you think about?”

“I wanted you to fuck me.” It was hardly more damning than everything else he’d just said, but his face went burning hot at the words. “Of course, I was a stupid idiot and I had no idea how fucking _worked_, I thought— I thought it meant you’d fuck my thighs. Between my legs.” As a child, it had felt like the height of depravity. Eddie made a harsh sound against his lips, a sort of angry growl that should have been really stupid but kind of made Richie swoon a little bit. He went on, all of it spilling from some tender aching place inside of him. “I used to… after I saw you off at home, I’d ride away on my stupid bike and every time the road got bumpy, I used to grind against the saddle, close my thighs—”

“_Holy shit_,” Eddie said, sounding like every fantasy Richie had ever had, even when he couldn’t remember him.

“—and I’d think about you the whole time.” He laughed weakly, feeling the tightness in his belly. “It was so fucking embarrassing. By the time I got home, god, you had no idea. I remember I used to circle the block until I’d winded down a bit.”

“I can’t believe,” Eddie said, breathless. Richie shuddered.

“I wasn’t very subtle about it either, you were just stupid. You were so fucking stupid—” He was babbling, by now, which always happened when he got close; it was the curse of his life that he could never fucking shut up.

“I love you,” he said, brokenly. “I love you so much and I should’ve said it and now— I’m going to miss you forever.” He held on to Eddie as he came, clawing into his shoulder, kept embracing him in the aftermath in fear he would disappear.

“I lied, by the way.” He tugged at Eddie’s shirt, feeling the tears where the claw had ripped into his body. “I don’t want to forget you. It’d be like if a part of me was gone. I love you,” he said, again, “I should’ve told you a long time ago, I was just— Eds? Eddie?”

Something was happening — he could feel it in the air like static, a frizzle on his skin that reminded him of hazy summer afternoons before a storm. It was dark by now, but the distant streetlights were enough to see that Eddie's face was slack and unconscious, his eyes closed.

And when Richie pressed the back of his hand against Eddie's cheek it felt like skin, soft and human, still cold but not deadly so. He was a dead weight in Richie’s arms, and so he crouched down and laid him gently on the ground, tearing open what was left of Eddie’s soiled shirt to run his hands across his chest.

There was a very faint heartbeat. Had that been there earlier? Eddie’s body had felt different, hard and smooth and like it hadn’t been entirely here; now he seemed very human, and very weak. Richie spent a long agonising moment weighing the pros and cons of keeping his wild hopes under control, versus the possibility that maybe he was just really drunk, versus the very small but not-negligible chance that this Eddie would turn into Pennywise and eat him.

“If this is a fucking trick, I swear,” he said, loud enough for any supernatural entities around to hear him, but he was already slipping his phone out of his jeans pocket and calling for an ambulance.

The rest of the night was a whirlwind. He had to make up a whole lot of bullshit and stick with it as he repeated the same story to three different groups of people, rack his brain for what little he remembered about Eddie’s medical history, and find a spare moment or two to call cousin Clara and tell her that he was going to miss her big dinner after ostensively flying across the country for it.

“But listen, you have no idea of what just happened,” he said into the phone. “I swear I’ll tell you everything tomorrow, and I’ll bring extra candies for all the kids.”

“You’re not feeding crap to my children, Rich—”

“I’ll call you tomorrow and you’ll tell me what to buy,” he bargained. “Gotta go. Night!”

He hung up and went to buy himself a snack from the vending machine while he waited for the imposing Nurse Larry to let him in. He felt strange, and maybe it was the shock, or all the booze he had earlier, or the general _Derryness_ in the air, but Richie couldn’t shake the thought that there was something else, too. He felt jumpy, like he was being observed, all too aware of shadowed corners and every chirp and noise in the night.

“This better not be a trick,” he muttered, crumpling an innocent bags of chips in his fist and realising too late that he’d just condemned himself to having to eat a bunch of crumbles.

When they finally let him in to see Eddie, he wiped off his hands on his thighs and marched into the unassuming hospital room with the same mix of excitement and deadly terror he’d felt his first-ever gig. Eddie was in there, lying in bed in a drab hospital gown with the stab wound on his face that looked like it’d had a few months to heal and a jagged mess on his chest that had left the medical staff puzzled beyond belief. He walked through the door and Eddie’s head snapped up, staring at him like he was somehow the best and the absolute scariest thing he’d ever seen.

Richie tried saying something, but it came out an undignified croak. He blinked away the haze in his eyes and tried again.

“Are you really here?”

He’d been expecting one of a dozen possible snarky answers. Instead, Eddie looked down to his hands in his lap and said, softly, “I think so.”

“You were dead, Eds.”

“I know, I was there.”

Richie walked closer to the bed. He could see the outline of Eddie’s body under the covers; he sat down and pressed his hand over the shape of Eddie’s ankle like he’d used to do as a kid, caressing it gently.

“About that...”

“It was miserable, thank you for asking,” Eddie said. “I was just… I couldn’t leave this fucking town, you know? I tried. And you were all gone, and I got that, obviously, I was happy for you but it was — awful.”

Richie couldn’t look at him. “I’m sorry. You know I didn’t— I hated the thought of leaving you back there. I’m so sorry.”

Softly, Eddie said, “But you did come back.”

They remained in silence like that for some time, Richie’s hand on Eddie’s leg, soothingly, and somehow he knew that Eddie needed the touch more than he was letting on, almost as much as Richie needed to feel him here.

“So,” he said, eventually. Carefully. “Back there. Did you know what was going to happen?”

When they’d kissed, the first time, Richie had thought that there might have been some kind of magic in play. He’d half-wondered if he wasn’t about to die somehow, devoured whole, aching heart and everything, but Eddie had been kissing him and it’d seemed like a risk worth taking.

Then Eddie had pulled away and he’d found himself still alive, and it’d been all too perfect to think that it was anything but a hallucination his mind had made up. Richie could feel his face scrunching up at the memory, probably flushing the colours of an entire sunset. He thought about all the things he’d said— unguarded, shameless. He dared to sneak a look to Eddie’s face and found him smiling slightly.

“I didn’t know,” Eddie said. “At first. I didn’t expect… I thought you would leave, obviously, I wanted you to leave but I wanted to.” He stared at the ceiling. “Before you went, I wanted us to—”

“Do nasty things in front of your mom’s grave?”

“Have something to remember you by.”

Richie went quiet. Eddie said, “I thought I’d never see you again. And then you were saying all those things, and I could feel— I think you opened yourself to me, and I used that to pull myself out.”

He thought about it. “So, is it bad? Like, did we mess with the order of the universe or something? Because…” Richie shrugged. “Gotta say, I don’t really care.”

“I don’t know.” Eddie made a show of looking around, turning his head right then left. “I think the universe’s still standing.”

“Good. Hate to break a good thing,” Richie said, nonsensically. “Maybe we could ask Mike to check, how about that? I’m…” He blinked, wiping his eyes discreetly on his sleeve. “I’m really glad you’re here.”

“Yeah, it’s a nice change,” Eddie said Richie snorted.

“I’m really glad that the sex magic of your mom’s grave let us have this.”

Eddie swatted him. “You know, that stopped being funny like three hours ago.”

“I don't care,” Richie said happily. “It's like all my dreams coming true at once. I'm going to bring it up for the rest of our lives and you can’t stop me.”

“I could murder you,” Eddie said without any heat at all.

“Ah, but would that really work as a permanent solution?” Richie felt like his jaw might dislodge. He must look unhinged with how much he was grinning, and that only made him smile more.

“Hey, Rich?”

“Yeah?”

Eddie stopped scratching the wound on his face and gave him a bashful look. It was adorable. “Look, I'm… dead tired, actually. All puns intended, I mean, I haven't slept a wink in the past three months, and I really want to.” His hand tugged at the hospital blanket. “I'm a bit afraid this is all a dream.”

“Don't worry,” Richie said, immediately. “I'll be here, holding your hand when you wake up. Both your hands. I could pinch you if you want, just to make sure.”

“You don't need to go that far,” Eddie said. “But thanks.” He shrugged, managing to somehow draw Richie’s attention to his upturned hand laying on the covers, wrist band and all. He might as well have wiggled his fingers, just to make it crystal clear.

Well, if he insisted. Eddie’s skin was warm now, flush with his heartbeat, and he turned his head into the pillow as Richie’s thumb skimmed over his knuckles.

“Sleep, and wake up,” he said. “And then we’re leaving. Your licence’s probably suspended, by the way, so you’ll have to let me drive.”

“Can't wait,” Eddie said, sleepily, and it came out more sincere than he probably meant it. Richie’s hold tightened around his knuckles.

“Great. I always love leaving this place. It’s going to be…” The last time he’d driven out of Derry, he’d been sobbing so hard he could barely see the road. The time before that he’d been restless and melancholic, torn between excitement and heartbreak. Both times, he’d felt like he was leaving a piece of his soul behind.

“It’s going to be great,” he said, watching a small smile tug at the corners of Eddie’s lips. “C’mon, sleep. I’m not going anywhere until the nice nurse kicks me out.”

Richie pressed the pad of his thumb against the pulse point at Eddie's wrist, just to feel it beating, and breathed.


End file.
